The theme of the peripheral landscape, a long-standing tradition in post-modern photography, takes on a unique and original slant in the project produced by Carlos Albalá and Ignasi López. In it, photographs by the two artists combine and interrelate to present a visual map of periurban areas in two Spanish regions: Madrid and Catalonia, respectively. “Objective” analysis of urban development and architectural transformations are enriched by the subtle emotional notes that echo through these silent landscapes, marked by memory whether recent or remote, childish or ideological. This is a demonstration that becomes a genuine pathetic fallacy of melancholy in times marked by speculation and demolition.

The project NOSTALGIA PERIURBANA has been granted by “BCN Producciò 08” (Barcelona city council) for the production. The image are 240 x 360 cm (each one) plotter paper prints over wall, Video-installation and art mail intervention with postcards.

“To the extent to which one can really ‘overcome’ the past, this overcoming consists of narrating what happened.” The human condition by Hannah Arent.

Please tell us briefly what the premises are behind your project for BCN Producció ‘08.

We are two photographers, Carlos Albalá and Ignasi López, one in the outskirts of Madrid and the other in the residential suburbs of Barcelona, who have exchanged images portraying the metamorphoses of our periurban environment. Our communication revealed strong links between the two habitats; there are parallels and interconnections between growth in the urban plain and the Mediterranean coastline; the city and its residential and industrial area of influence grow, on the one hand razing the ground but on the other leaving spaces freed from their original uses in a state of transition, lethargy or disuse, “out of play”. These are the city limits, places where nature or rural areas have been flattened to build a commercial
area; probably a shopping mall or an absurd dormitory town. The area outside the walls seems to become an internal residential park for continuous consumer and leisure activities. We photographed places in constant metamorphosis and spaces that progress, whether industrial or commercial, has excluded. At times nature recovers these places, generating, in a way, “images of botanical vindication”. The project Nostàlgia periurbana was born of a semi-conscious state of loss, experience and emotion, in which we trawl through our memories through the landscapes we have experienced.

How do you organise your rhythm of work? Do you set yourself strategies, or does it depend on each project?

Since this is a joint project, we organised and adapted our working rhythm to this circumstance, though we knew that as individuals we move in similar ways when it comes to organising our photographic series or projects. This is a dual discourse: Carlos, in the outskirts of Madrid, and Ignasi, on the Barcelona coastline, gradually building up our images. We made a topographic study of the land and then photographed it in order to exchange memories and feelings. The exchange, taking place over a long period of time, generated the synchrony of some images of spaces with different geographic situation but each joined by the emotional component of the lost or the taken away. Generally speaking, our rhythm of work is as follows: firstly, there is the need to communicate some feeling that we have experienced with regard to our changing environment. We study what caused it and photograph the places that are emotionally important to this environment. We then study all the images and discuss their potential and their shortcomings. Then we establish a hypothesis for a discourse that can develop this potential before returning the photograph the environment according to the discourse established.

Do you plan how the project will be presented and distributed from the start? What course do you think your project will take, both inside and outside art, when it becomes independent of the BCN Producció ‘08 framework?

Nostàlgia periurbana is a project with many aspects that can be developed. It was born in the city limits, in the connections between two cities and the limits between the feelings and visions of two artists working in different peripheries. All this should be reflected both in our work strategies and in our aims. One of our most immediate challenges is to put the idea of taking it to Madrid as an art installation into practice. We’re certain to find a very different and at the same time complementary audience there, and this encourages us to explore new forms of communication, and action, intervention and production methods, not only in the field of art. We want to see this project published, produced on paper and, probably, the photographs posted on the Internet. The emotional topography that frames our work leads us to believe that it may one day become free from its Please tell us briefly what the premises are behind your project for BCN Producció ‘08. We are two photographers, Carlos Albalá and Ignasi López, one in the outskirts of Madrid and the other in the residential suburbs of Barcelona, who have exchanged images portraying the metamorphoses of our periurban environment. Our communication revealed strong links between the two habitats; there are parallels and interconnections between growth in the urban plain and the Mediterranean coastline; the city and its residential and industrial area of influence grow, on the one hand razing the ground but on the other leaving spaces freed from their original uses in a state of transition, lethargy or disuse, “out of play”. These are the city limits, places where nature or rural areas have been flattened to build a commercial area; probably a shopping mall or an absurd dormitory town. The area outside the walls seems to become an internal residential park for continuous consumer and leisure activities. We photographed places in constant metamorphosis and spaces that progress, whether industrial or commercial, has excluded. At times nature recovers these places, generating, in a way, “images of botanical vindication”. The project Nostàlgia periurbana was born of a semi-conscious state of loss, experience and emotion, in which we trawl through our memories through the landscapes we have experienced.

How do you organise your rhythm of work? Do you set yourself strategies, or does it depend on each project?

Since this is a joint project, we organised and adapted our working rhythm to this circumstance, though we knew that as individuals we move in similar ways when it comes to organising our photographic series or projects. This is a dual discourse: Carlos, in the outskirts of Madrid, and Ignasi, on the Barcelona coastline, gradually building up our images. We made a topographic study of the land and then photographed it in order to exchange memories and feelings. The exchange, taking place over a long period of time, generated the synchrony of some images of spaces with different geographic situation but each joined by the emotional component of the lost or the taken away. Generally speaking, our rhythm of work is as follows: firstly, there is the need to communicate some feeling that we have experienced with regard to our changing environment. We study what caused it and photograph the places that are emotionally important to this environment. We then study all the images and discuss their potential and their shortcomings. Then we establish a hypothesis for a discourse that can develop this potential before returning the photograph the environment according to the discourse established.

Do you plan how the project will be presented and distributed from the start? What course do you think your project will take, both inside and outside art, when it becomes independent of the BCN Producció ‘08 framework?

Nostàlgia periurbana is a project with many aspects that can be developed. It was born in the city limits, in
the connections between two cities and the limits between the feelings and visions of two artists working in different peripheries. All this should be reflected both in our work strategies and in our aims. One of our most immediate challenges is to put the idea of taking it to Madrid as an art installation into practice. We’re certain to find a very different and at the same time complementary audience there, and this encourages us to explore new forms of communication, and action, intervention and production methods, not only in the field of art. We want to see this project published, produced on paper and, probably, the photographs posted on the Internet. The emotional topography that frames our work leads us to believe that it may one day become free from its specific context and that we will be able to produce a Nostàlgia periurbana somewhere away from our origins, outside the great cities, enabling us to explore at a distance from our own spaces, learning to make others a subject.

What are the artistic references that lie behind your work?

There are no conscious references at the origins of the project, but obviously what George Eastman House called the new topography in 1975 underlies the whole thing. Several photographers formed part of the show “New Topography: Photographs on a Man – Altered Landscape”, whose central theme was the landscape (Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke, Stephen Shore, and the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher). However, in terms of generations, we have taken more inspiration from their heirs: Andreas Gursky, Axel Hütte and Richard Misrach, amongst others. The Bechers and their heirs, generally speaking, reduced subjectivity to the maximum, and the new topography treats landscape in a rigorous, almost scientific way. In a less scientific, more sensitive, subjective connotation of spaces, we like to find in our personal references photographers such as Eugène Atget and Todd Hido, distant in time but sharing our emotional vision of spaces. That is why we describe our work as “emotional topography”.

What visual subtext do you think guides your photographs?

We believe very deeply in internally and externally trawling the nostalgia/space aesthetic conditioning factor that governs our work. There is no doubt that we both work according to different aesthetic parameters. In Ignasi’s case, he always seeks out the middle hours of the day, with the sun beating down, whilst Carlos explores universes more like London, grey and gloomy. The fusion between these generates a highly meaningful register characterising the aesthetic and the location in the city periphery. In the case of nostalgia or the emotional factor, which provides the central focus and nexus of the project, we agree with Cioran’s idea that the human being “does not know where to return to, nor how to return to a state from which he has lost all clear memory”. We blur spaces due to the profound use or state of transition to which they are subjected. We try to pause in them and show, face-to-face, what happened in them, what is happening. This is the only way we know to overcome the effect of having these places taken away from us.

Of course, nostalgia is a romantic subject, and there are many complications to representing it. We talk about nostalgia manufactured by the media, about missing aesthetic experiences, etc. Could you give us your own view of the term?

Nostalgia is a superficial wound in the soul, a small wound that will not heal. And it lies at the genesis of our project. We should remember that the origins are in our feelings, and in the periurban space seen through our own empathy. We believe that Mariano Ibérico’s definition of nostalgia is very much on the right track, and is very close to our more formal vision of the term: “a feeling of enchantment before the memory of an object that is missing or has disappeared forever in time, a feeling of pain before the inaccessibility of the object and, finally, a wish to once again transpose the enigmatic distance that separates today from yesterday and to restore the soul to the situation that time has abolished” (Mariano Ibérico, Perspectivas sobre el tiempo, U. N. M. San Marcos, Lima, 1958, p. 164).

A person does not move through lived-in space; rather, the space changes and transforms around him. Therefore, the place is taken away from him to make him unconsciously feel a gradually detachment from the environment experienced in the past. But at the same time we feel an essential aesthetic attraction to these environments, to the spaces we show in our work. The feeling of nostalgia depends, amongst other things, on an object or series of objects on which feelings are focused. Fetish, transitional object… whatever you call it. From there, a difference appears between “objects perceived as natural” (let us say, the Proustian madeleine) and “consumer objects”. The former generate a “legitimate” nostalgia discourse, seen as timeless and transcendental, whilst the latter are suspected of being excessively dated. I ignore the evident fact that madeleines do not grow on trees and are no more natural than are Tiggers or Pink Panthers (a few years ago, Los Sencillos used one of these cakes, without the wrapping, to illustrate the cover for one of their records; “naked” melancholy, I suppose). The question is, how the feeling of melancholy changes when the object that causes it becomes, let us say, historicised, charged with new meanings for consumer circulation (fashion, revival, retro, etc.). Yes, a certain commercial “manipulation” of nostalgia with regard to objects, things and even places exists (and has always existed, or is it generational?). Let us take, for example, adverts for Juanola cough sweets, or the birthplaces of any writer or artist (is not the tourist’s need to visit the house “where so-and-so was born” or “where something we don’t even care about happened” a case of induced nostalgia?). We believe that the habit of assimilating as our own those experiences we have read about or acquired through the media which reinforce the nostalgic effect exercised by things or objects to which we previously attached no importance is generational or typical of our time.

This is, in short, consumer nostalgia. Like love, or desire, or fear, it is used to manipulate, as they are feelings present in all of us. It is precisely for this reason that we believe it to be a feeling affected by time, but which has always existed. The loosening of links, detachment, encourages this emigration. In our case, we photograph the emigration of our spaces from us. We have not moved, but the places have changed to the point where we do not recognise them, reinforcing the sense of loss. There is certainly something generational about this, as periurban environments have changed enormously over the last thirty years. I believe this has to do with the attempt to define a sentimentality of the abandoned place, as
occurs with the empty swimming pool in your photograph.

It is something like a second-degree sentimentality, which starts by “stating the desolation” (the empty space, the disappearance of the subject, etc.) and ends by including an emotive element in it, whether as a remain, a note… such as graffiti, in your photographs. We show superficial wounds in the periurban space; these wounds also speak of exclusion. Urban tribes, junkies… They all at times make marginal uses of these spaces, empty and disused. But all this is accessory; it is more informative and anthropological juxtaposition, if that is possible. We believe that the sentimentality of the abandoned place lies in change and abandonment. Then someone gets in there and ruins it, but that is another question. One of your works shows the rear of an advertising hoarding. I feel that, within the series, this photograph is one of those that permits a reading most closely focused on the subject of the mediasphere –perhaps in a less “emotional” way than the others, I would say. I suppose that one question all spectators will ask themselves is which of the two carries more weight; I mean, if this is an exhibition on “consumer spaces” or “emotive spaces”. That image will not be included in the exhibition, but it does belong in our discourse. We proposed this second part of the work for the catalogue. It is the useful side in the virtual world of those spaces that are useless in the real world. Hoardings belong to the world of the media and of suggestion from a distance. We explore the physical space they occupy. Most times, these places are the same as the spaces in transition that we show. To a certain extent, it is a commercial form of vindication. Your images create atmospheres and suggest moods. So much so, that one could imagine a possible soundtrack for the series. What spring to mind are post-rock groups like Tortoise, with their empty landscapes and enveloping atmospheres. That’s right. In fact, we are currently editing a video for the show, with still images, in response to the need to create an environmental context for the large photographs, “illustrated” by music to match the images, increasing their enveloping nature, in theory. What happened is that, once the images had been recorded on DVcam and we viewed them, we noticed that the real sound for each still shot was much more movingly nostalgic and suggestive than any music deliberately “manufactured” for them. Silence, a bird, children playing in the distance, the noise of the motorway or the wind; this is the most tremendous soundtrack there can be to describe the lethargic mood you find in these places.

Even so, we feel that this series of photos does suggest a soundtrack, not as something added, but one you can listen to when you leave La Capella. Luckily enough, Calle Tallers is right outside and you can go and buy some records there (we could produce a sheet with recommended listening that people could pick up at La Capella). To end, we would like you to comment on some of the quotations that you yourselves suggested during the process of organising the exhibition. “If we wish to represent a historical sequence in spatial terms, we can do so only by juxtaposition in space, for the same space cannot accommodate two different things.” (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents) This frames our images. Many of them are situated within a long present time without use. The whole thing is a moment of transition between ways of understanding and exploiting spaces. Different pasts, histories, personal experiences, uses, etc., are all juxtaposed… and at that precise moment, the space is all there is, empty, as landscape and image that tells all. “We have adopted the language of binary systems. In binary, there is only YES and NO, and no intermediate state, which excludes biological and organic processes: emotion.” (Darren Almond)

In the same way, the spaces on the margins, those that do not work, those that go over the line of what is profitable, are excluded. What happens is that those spaces were once spaces for life, for emotion and the past. The greys give meaning to the black and white. So there is no more statement than leaving a space in a NO, where nature can reinvent it, until it interests someone economically enough to make it a YES. We want Nostalgia periurbana to be a medium grey, an intermediate point in the process of transformation.